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These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat. They were running on Linux.
The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1 comes after job 999.
Cool cat Adam R. commented "I've been getting a bunch of messages from null in my WhatsApp hockey group."
We all know the perils of bad date handling, and Claus was handed an annoying down bug in some date handling.
The end users of Claus's application do a lot of work in January. It's the busiest time of the year for them. Late last year, one of the veteran users raised a warning: "Things stop working right in January, and it creates a lot of problems."
Dear Third-Party API Support,
You're probably wondering how and why your authorization server has been getting hammered every single day for more than 4 years. It was me. It was us—the company I work for, I mean. Let me explain.
Joe recently worked on a financial system for processing loans. Like many such applications, it started its life many, many years ago. It began as an Oracle Forms application in the 90s. By the late 2000s, Oracle was trying to push people away from forms into their newer tools, like Oracle ApEx (Application Express), but this had the result of pushing people out of Oracle's ecosystem and onto their own web stacks.
The application Joe was working on was exactly that. Now, no one was going to migrate off of an Oracle database, especially because 90% of their business logic was wired together out of PL/SQL packages. But they did start using Java for developing their UI, and then at some other point, started using Liquibase for helping them maintain and manage their schema.
SQL Server Integration Services is Microsoft's ETL tool. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for describing data flows from sources to sinks, complete with transformations and all sorts of other operations, and is useful for migrating data between databases, linking legacy mainframes into modern databases, or doing what most people seem to need: migrating data into Excel spreadsheets.
It's essentially a full-fledged scripting environment, with a focus on data-oriented operations. The various nodes you can drag-and-drop in are database connections, queries, transformations, file system operations, calls to stored procedures, and so on. It even lets you run .NET code inside of SSIS.
There is fire sale on "Test In Production" incidents this week. (Ok, truth is that some of them are a little crusty and stale so we just mark them way down and push them all out at a loss). To be completely fair, testing in production is vitally important. If you didn't do that, the only way you'd know if something is broken is when one of your paying customers finds out. I call that testing in production the expensive way. The only WTFy thing about these is that when you test in production, your customers shouldn't stumble across the messes.
"We don't often test, but when we do it's always in production" snarked Brad W. unfairly. "My phone gave its default alert noise mixed with... some sound that made it seem like the phone was damaged. This was the alert that appeared. "
Carol sends us today's nasty bit of code. It does the thing you should never do: serializes by string munging.
public string ToJSON()
{
double unixTimestamp = ConvertToMillisecondsSinceEpoch(time);
string JSONString = "{\"type\":\"" + type + "\",\"data\":{";
foreach (string key in dataDict.Keys)
{
string value = dataDict[key].ToString();
string valueJSONString;
double valueNumber;
bool valueBool;
if (value.Length > 2 && value[0].Equals('(') && value[value.Length - 1].Equals(')')) //tuples
{
char[] charArray = value.ToCharArray();
charArray[0] = '[';
charArray[charArray.Length - 1] = ']';
if (charArray[charArray.Length - 2].Equals(','))
charArray[charArray.Length - 2] = ' ';
valueJSONString = new string(charArray);
}
else if ((value.Length > 1 && value[0].Equals('{') && value[value.Length - 1].Equals('}')) ||
(double.TryParse(value, out valueNumber))) //embedded json or numbers
{
valueJSONString = value;
}
else if (bool.TryParse(value, out valueBool)) //bools
{
valueJSONString = value.ToLower();
}
else //everything else is a string
{
valueJSONString = "\"" + value + "\"";
}
JSONString = JSONString + "\"" + key + "\":" + valueJSONString + ",";
}
if (dataDict.Count > 0) JSONString = JSONString.Substring(0, JSONString.Length - 1);
JSONString = JSONString + "},\"time\":" + unixTimestamp.ToString() + "}";
return JSONString;
}